They're delicious, diverse and glorious symbols of our country, so why are we allowing English apples to die out?

By PAUL KINGSNORTH

Last updated at 20:50 17 March 2008

During my early 20s, I worked for an environmental group campaigning to save the Amazonian rainforests, the fashionable green issue of the day. This seems to have slipped off the agenda now, though the rate of their

destruction is as great as ever.

We made the case that they were vital for soaking up the world's carbon emissions and that rainforest plants were a source of medicines for mankind.

I was always uncomfortable with this argument that the forests should be saved because they were useful. It was

enough for me that they were an entirely unique marvel and to destroy them for the sake of toilet paper or soya

beans was criminal.

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English to the core: If you ate a different English apple every day for six years, you still wouldn't have tried every variety

I now feel the same about the orchards of England. That we have so many amazing varieties of a single fruit, the

apple, is a wonder that we should be boasting about and holding on to tightly.

Instead, we are letting it slip away because there's no profit in it. But the extent of this national treasure

is extraordinary. If you ate a different variety of apple every day for six years, you would still not have exhausted the list of those which are, or can be, grown in England.

It is our national fruit, and the country's orchards were once famed throughout the world for the diversity of their produce.

Every county, every soil type, in some places every village, grew its own variety. Eggleton Styre, Kirkston Pippin, Lady Henniker, Cornish Honeypin — these are just a few of the varieties once grown across the country.

Their names tie locality to people, to history, to ecology. The apple is to England what fromage is to France — an identifier of place, a creator of culture, a symbol of the nation.

But walk into any of the big supermarkets — which sell 70 per cent of all the apples bought today — and that symbol is a sorry one. If you can tell which apples are home-grown and which are imported, you may be lucky and spot an English Royal Gala or a Cox's Orange Pippin.

But that will probably be it. And even these will have been selected not for taste or seasonality, but for their

ability to travel long distances without bruising.

They will have been packed in factories by machines that measure their diameter to the nearest millimetre and

their 'colour ratio' to the last degree.

It is not surprising, then, that the English apple business is on its knees. Devon has lost 90 per cent of its orchards since 1965; East Anglia 80 per cent since 1950. You can drive down roads in Herefordshire or Kent that even five years ago ran past blossoming trees, and today all that is left are shrivelled stumps.

Overall, the 80,000 hectares of English agricultural land dedicated to growing fruit before the war has now shrunk to 20,000. Most alarmingly of all, only a paltry 2,000 of those hectares are genuinely ancient orchards, managed in the traditional way.

I am in Worcestershire, in the heart of England, on a cold December morning for a unique event — the Tenbury Wells mistletoe sale. Vast bundles of the stuff are lined up in rows. Men walk between them judging their quality, knee-high in white berries.

But the crucial question everyone is asking is, will this be the last time? Will there be mistletoe to auction in coming years? You see, mistletoe thrives in orchards — and when the orchards vanish, the mistletoe vanishes, too.

It's a mysterious plant, still not properly understood by science. It grows wild on certain trees in certain places at certain times. Nobody knows why it prefers some trees to others, or why it is abundant in some parts of the country and non-existent in others.

I am with Reg Farmer, appropriately named, who has worked the land in the Teme Valley for most of his life. When we visit an ancient orchard on a grassy hill close to his farm, he can identify every tree and take a good guess at its age.

"The old orchards around here have apples in them that most people have never heard of," he says. "A farmer I know has over a hundred varieties in his.

"Look at this tree here," he says as he ambles over to an ancient, hunched specimen. "It's a Casey Codling. It's a cooker, and commercially it's no use at all. But that's a very rare old apple."

Not that this matters any more. These orchards are on their way out. They are being levelled daily, and the

old apple trees destroyed. With them go centuries of accumulated knowledge, rare or possibly unique fruit varieties — and the mistletoe they support.

"This whole valley was once covered in orchards," says Reg, "But if you go to the supermarkets, it's mostly foreign apples now. There, it's all about eye appeal, isn't it?"

Reg looks out between the trees across the valley and points. "Look at the ground there, you'll see the fruit

wasn't harvested this year. It wasn't last year, either. The owner's planning to sell up.

"He told me to strip out all the mistletoe. I expect it will all go. Things change, don't they?"

By the time you read this, the orchard on the hill with the Casey Codling, the badgers and the butterflies,

the centuries of layered history and meaning, the roots both physical and metaphorical, will probably be

gone.

The trees will have been grubbed up and burned, and the land put to more profitable use. Everybody has to make a living, and there's not much living in rare apples now, or in mistletoe.

On top of a clay hill in Kent I witness the future of the apple business. Seven days ago, this was an empty

field. Now there are 10,000 trees, 18-month-old saplings, planted in dead straight lines, between concrete poles

whose tops are connected with wires.

The trees are less than a metre apart, the better to squeeze in more. They have been bred to produce far

more fruit than the average. This is a "Concept Orchard" and it could well revolutionise the business.

Conceived by OrchardWorld, one of the country's major fruit suppliers, it is an ambitious attempt to steal a

march on other companies, and to adapt traditional fruit-growing methods for a globalised, computerised,

supermarket age.

The trees still smell gorgeous in flower, and the apples they produce undoubtedly taste pretty good, too. But that is all that this place has in common with the old-style orchards.

The Concept Orchard has been extensively researched, tested and developed — where the trees come from, exactly how deep they are planted, how the ground is prepared, how many boughs, the ratios and relationships.

Nothing is left to chance. This is apple-growing as a slick machine. When it gets going, it will be fearsomely efficient. A traditional Kent orchard produces around 20 tons of fruit for every hectare of trees.

The Concept Orchard will crop three times as much. It has been planted with just half a dozen favoured varieties, the ones that sell well — Cox, Braeburn, Royal Gala — and one or two experimental ones, including one from China.

The man from OrchardWorld has no doubt that this is the future of English apple-growing. If he is right, then it will be another triumph for homogeneity and the blandness that is modern life, another defeat for the England I love.

You may well ask why it matters if English apples go down to a handful of varieties. Most of the other ones

can't be sold and won't be bought.

We could stick preservation orders on a few old trees or orchards but, realistically, we can't set aside

hundreds of thousands of hectares to grow fruit that no one wants, just because they're rare.

But there's another way of looking at this. If, as the experts reckon, we have — at a conservative estimate —

somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 varieties of apple in England, we have something special indeed.

We have a piece of living history. We have the literal fruits of the efforts of thousands of people over hundreds of years.

No one is suggesting that Sainsbury's should sell them all. But these old fruits, and the old orchards they grow in, should be preserved — at least in part, as examples — just because they are so wonderful.

Apples connect us to our past. Orchards are beautiful landscapes, and provide havens for birds, insects and other species that have been having a hell of a time of it in the increasingly intensive, chemical-soaked

countryside of today.

True, there is often little or no money in them. But then there is little or no money in opera, seashores,

badgers, butterflies, moors, statues, tumuli or red telephone boxes, and we don't seem to have a problem

preserving those.

It is a matter of priorities. What do we value? And what do we overlook? We don't have to be steam-rollered

by the mass-market into destroying our heritage. There are alternatives.

At Putley in Herefordshire, a pig is munching on semi-rotten apples. Sun streams through the straight lines of

apple trees that crawl up a slope away from me. This is Dragon Orchard. It's a beautiful place.

Next to the house, a man is sorting through a bag of quinces. They smell gorgeous: sharp, fragrant, addictive.

Norman Stanier and his wife Ann run a traditional English orchard that has been here for 150 years, and they are

making it flourish.

When they took over the family business, it was collapsing. They couldn't keep up with the big boys supplying the supermarkets, and all the other outlets for their fruit, such as cider and jam, had disappeared.

"We tried farmers' markets, but apples are low value and by the time you've loaded the van and taken them

down there, you don't make much."

So they went back to basics, asking themselves what they had that other people might want and be prepared to

pay for.

"And we realised that what we had that was special was this idyllic old orchard. Perhaps we could draw in

people not just with fruit for sale, but by making them feel part of it."

They launched a "crop-sharing" scheme aimed directly at the apple buying public. For an annual fee of

£300, people get a car-boot-full of fruit to take away. They also get to visit four times a year, to take part in the harvesting and bring their kids to play under the trees.

"We didn't know if it would work," says Norman, "It was an experiment. We said we'd try it for a year." That was

five years ago. They had stumbled across a new way of making a living from very old trees.

"Think of Fair Trade," says Norman, and it's a good analogy. People are happy to pay a bit more for a Third

World product if they know the extra is going to the producer.

Most people, Norman reckons, wouldn't mind paying just a penny a pound more for their fruit if they knew

it would save an orchard, a landscape, a traditional way of life.

At Dragon Orchard, joining in the seasonal cycle has proved a great attraction to the visiting "sharers".

"Then they come in spring, and the orchard is in blossom, and there's maypoles and morris-dancing. In the summer it's an evening barbecue and the smell of mown grass. Autumn is harvesting, the deep colours, the fruit.

"It is a real connection to the land. That's what the people who come here appreciate most, because so many of them simply don't have it any more."

I can sympathise with that. To me, saving the orchards and the apples of old England — those that are left,

anyway — has come to be as important a crusade as saving the rainforests.

We must not let them slide away from us because they don't make money and the land is needed for housing estates or to grow bio-fuels. If they are allowed to disappear, it would be a loss to English culture and a tragedy for each and every one of us.

• Abridged extract from Real England by Paul Kingsnorth, published by Portobello Books